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Within teaching and learning in Higher Education, the development of students' evaluative judgement has recently garnered noticeable attention. Exemplar analysis and peer review are among key pedagogical activities that have been identified, by researchers, as being important for developing both students' evaluative judgement and their feedback literacy. The aim of this study was to explore what supported undergraduate students' experiences of developing their judgements of quality and what supported students when implementing those judgements. The study was carried out in a third level institution in the Republic of Ireland during a first year Bachelor of Arts social care module. The thirty-three participating students peer reviewed assessment work through a process which aimed to cultivate their experiences to judge not only their peers' work, but ultimately their own. Qualitative data generated from students included exit slip reflections, recorded classroom discussions; two focus group discussions; and thirteen semi-structured interviews. A reflexive thematic analysis of the data generated three main themes of importance for the students' experiences: guidance, engagement, and judgement. Subthemes coming under each of these themes related to what contributed to students' development of their judgements of quality and the implementation of their judgements of quality. The findings indicate that the formative nature of this process, along with students' involvement in the feedback process, were significant for their learning and developing their evaluative judgment. This study confirms those which have demonstrated that students benefit from being afforded opportunities to engage in judging academic work because it can not only help students to think more about their own work, but also how to amend it, if needed. Overall, it shows that involving students in judgement processes over time is important when it comes to developing their judgement.

This thesis concerns a longitudinal study of the practice of Live Peer Assessment on two University courses in Computer Science. By Live Peer Assessment I mean a practice of whole-class collective marking using electronic devices of student artefacts demonstrated in a class or lecture theatre with instantaneous aggregated results displayed on screen immediately after each grading decision. This is radically different from historical peer-assessment in universities which has primarily been asynchronous process of marking of students' work by small subsets of the cohort (e.g. 1 student artefact is marked by < 3 fellow students). Live Peer Assessment takes place in public, is marked by (as far as practically possible) the whole cohort, and results are instantaneous. This study observes this practice, first on a level 4 course in E-Media Design where students' main assignment is a multimedia CV (or resume) and secondly on a level 7 course in Multimedia Specification Design and Production where students produce a multimedia information artefact in both prototype and final versions. In both cases, students learned about these assignments from reviewing works done by previous students in Live Peer Evaluation events where they were asked to collectively publicly mark those works according to the same rubrics that the tutors would be using. In this level 4 course, this was used to help students get a better understanding of the marks criteria. In the level 7 course, this goal was also pursued, but was also used for the peer marking of students' own work. Among the major findings of this study are: • In the level 4 course student attainment in the final assessment improved on average by 13% over 4 iterations of the course, with very marked increase among students in the lower percentiles • The effectiveness of Live Peer Assessment in improving student work comes from o Raising the profile of the marking rubric o Establishing a repertoire of example work o Modelling the 'noticing' of salient features (of quality or defect) enabling students to self-monitor more effectively • In the major accepted measure of peer-assessment reliability (correlation between student awarded marks and tutor awarded marks) Live Peer Assessment is superior to traditional peer assessment. That is to say, students mark more like tutors when using Live Peer Assessment • In the second major measure (effect-size) which calculates if students are more strict or generous than tutors, (where the ideal would be no difference), Live Peer Assessment is broadly comparable with traditional peer assessment but this is susceptible to the conditions under which it takes place • The reason for the better greater alignment of student and tutor marks comes from the training sessions but also from the public nature of the marking where individuals can compare their marking practice with that of the rest of the class on a criterion by criterion basis • New measures proposed in this thesis to measure the health of peer assessment events comprise: Krippendorf's Alpha, Magin's Reciprocity Matrix, the median pairwise tutor student marks correlation, the Skewness and Kurtosis of the distribution of pairwise tutor student marking correlations • Recommendations for practice comprise that: o summative peer assessment should not take place under conditions of anonymity but that very light conditions of marking competence should be enforced on student markers (e.g. > 0.2 correlation between individual student marking and that of tutors) o That rubrics can be more suggestive and colloquial in the conditions of Live Peer Assessment because the marking criteria can be instantiated in specific examples of student attainment and therefore the criteria may be less legalistically drafted because a more holistic understanding of quality can be communicated.

This applied research in education was undertaken within the context of a school mentoring programme, where my role as a mentor researcher is directed at promoting change in teacher pedagogy consistent with junior-high school educational reforms in Israel. The purpose of this study has been twofold: 1) to confront conflicting issues that exist between the need for change in teacher pedagogy and the resistance felt by many of them toward ‘never ending’ new reforms and: 2). to investigate the impact of the mentoring model (MM) on learning processes that foster teacher empowerment. Assessment of empowerment, as both a process and a product, drew on the teachers' metacognitive development, growing sense of satisfaction and self-efficacy as mediators of their pupils' thinking/learning skills. This study presents a unique approach to teacher empowerment through its theoretical and methodological perspectives. Socio-cultural perspectives serve as an over-arching framework through which various theoretical perspectives for learning and development may be integrated. Action research and discourse analysis were found to be compatible with the researcher’s philosophical approach, whereby educators engage in a collaborative learning process that promotes shared visions and goals. Promoting the characteristics of a learning organisation within the school shed light on ways that can provide teachers with a nurturing environment within the complex dynamics of the school. The detailed account and interpretation of the multi-level reciprocal interactions that occur between teachers, mentor and the school organisation presented in this study is especially significant for understanding multidimensional developmental processes. It illustrates the evolution of inventive methodological tools (such as skills rubrics and discourse analysis techniques), which assume to provide new perspectives for fostering the teachers’ trust in their own judgement when mediating higher order thinking skills. These findings are of particular relevance as contemporary research indicates that teachers often experience difficulties in practicing metacognitive pedagogy.

The purpose of this empirical research study was to gain knowledge about the practice habits of elementary school students in Grades 5 and 6. Sixty-five instrumental music students served as research subjects. They were enrolled in the newly established string orchestra supported by the Fairfax Elementary School District. Drawing upon my empirical experiences and instrumental music training, I identified and examined practice habits affecting motivation to learn music. Data generated from five open-ended and ten closed-ended questions were analyzed and contributed to the findings from the survey. An examination of published literature also contributed to the collection of resource data. Problems of practice were then identified in three primary areas that contributed to substandard practice habits: inconsistent or random practice time, lack of support structure, and the need for additional adult support. The results of this study provide further insight on how to better serve instrumental music students and leverage effective support systems, such as aural skills and rubrics, to improve practice habits. Students can improve their substandard practice habits by recognizing and correcting problematic areas in instrumental control, rhythm, intonation, as well as their ability to read and apply standard notation. Improvements in these areas are crucial for increasing student interest and sustaining enrollment in school music programs.

Online learning is one of the fastest growing trends in education. A practical problem faced by instructional designers and online instructors is how to design an interactive learning activity that benefits content mastery without adding technological barriers. The online discussion forum provides quick solutions because it is usually ready for use in mainstream online learning systems and affords peer interaction and online community building in a flexible manner. This dissertation sets the study site to asynchronous argumentative discussion, a type of online forum activity that minimizes the need of communication immediacy and maximizes the quality of communication. Asynchronous argumentative discussions can foster not only purposeful social interaction among online learners but also higher-order cognitive processing of learning content. Previous studies show promising results that learners engage in more cognitive elaboration and acquire argumentation knowledge when the discussion process is well facilitated. However, challenges exist due to the nature of asynchronous communication, the heavy load on reading and writing, and the declined participation before reaching learning objectives. This study applied self-regulated learning theory to explore the possible benefit of using self-regulatory strategies for asynchronous argumentative discussions. Specifically, the study examines how goals, writing, responding, and reflection strategies may influence students’ participation performance from both quantity and quality aspects. The four research questions of the study are: (1) How do students set goals for asynchronous argumentative discussions? (2) Can goals predict students’ participation quantity? (3) Can goals predict students’ use of self-regulatory strategies (i.e., writing, responding, reflection strategies)? (4) What are the relationships between goals, self-regulatory strategies, and post quality?This study recruited 203 college students as participants from six sessions of an online learning technology course during Autumn 2019 and Spring 2020. In this course, students spent two weeks discussing around a controversial topic: “Will students learn the best when they are taught through their preferred learning style?” The discussion activity had two phases: a preparation phase and an interaction phase. In the preparation phase, students posted an evaluation of a credible source they found and drafted their initial arguments by the end of the first week. This initial argument writing was facilitated by an online source evaluation learning module. In the interaction phase, students responded to each other and produced refined arguments by the end of the second week. Students reported their goals in the preparation phase and their strategy use at the end of the discussion. Students’ posts, metadata associated with each post (e.g., author, reply to whom, time), and forum visit logs were collected as the data sources.This study developed a scoring rubric to rate three aspects of students’ goals: peer interaction tendency, learning commitment, and performance standard. Using these three scores, the study clustered the goals and discovered four configurations: (1) no goal, (2) performance-dominated goals, (3) self-dominant learning goals, and (4) peer interaction learning goals. Based on the four goal configurations, the results from analysis of variance and structural equation modeling suggested the advantages of setting peer interaction learning goals. The advantages are a higher level of participation quantity (i.e., more posts generated, more replies given, more unique reply targets), more frequent use of self-regulatory strategies for online discussions (i.e., writing, responding, reflection strategies), and better performance in the preparation phase (i.e., better quality of online source evaluation post). In contrast, students who set performance-dominated goals used responding strategies and reflection strategies less often, produced fewer posts, gave fewer replies to others, and responded to fewer unique peer learners. However, there was no statistically significant difference across goal configurations when comparing their argumentative post quality.The structural equation models suggested two mediator variables for goals to affect argumentative post quality. The effect of goals on initial argumentative post quality was mediated through writing strategy and source evaluation. Although goals were not directly associated with argumentative post quality, these findings together suggested that argumentative post quality was directly associated with source evaluation performance which could be improved by using more writing strategies. Because students who set peer interaction learning goals were more likely to more frequently use writing strategies, they had overall better performance in the asynchronous argumentative discussion, compared to the no-goal students and the students with performance-dominated goals.

Points-driven grading systems are prolific and persistent in American K-12 education, despite research indicating their gender and racial bias in implementation (Cornwell, Mustard & Van Parys, 2013), their lack of accuracy in representing student achievement (Allen, 2005), and their negative effect on learning (Klapp, 2015). Research indicates while teachers are open to changing their practice, they want assurance that changes will lead to improved outcomes for their students (Millard, 2016). The purpose of the study was to determine whether standards-based grading rubrics developed through a shared leadership approach significantly increased academic growth and the percentage of students demonstrating acceptable levels of growth in early literacy, reading, and math skill development. Participants in the causal-comparative post-hoc study were comprised of kindergarten through grade two students in two Midwestern public school districts, one of which issued standards-based grades while the other issued grades under a points-driven grading system. Academic growth data in the form of student growth percentiles were gathered using STAR¿ assessments, an online assessment tool used in both districts to measure achievement and growth. Results indicated no effect for rubric implementation in any of the three subject areas when comparing the two districts’ growth scores; nor was there a significant difference in the percentage of students demonstrating acceptable growth in reading or math. However, a significantly higher percentage of students did demonstrate acceptable growth in early literacy skills after standards-based grading rubrics were implemented. The researcher concluded that teacher involvement in the development of the rubrics, as well as their use of the rubrics for instructional purposes could have mediated the effect of the tools’ use.

This thesis uses qualitative and quantitative research strategies to understand the effectiveness of two classroom activities designed to teach for transfer in first-year composition (FYC). Drawing on students' completed Reflect, Project, Imagine heuristics and their comments on rubrics used to assess their own writing, this project explores students' perceptions of potential transfer between FYC and other writing contexts and the ways writing-related language can be cultivated in the FYC classroom through critical self-reflection and metacognition. Students participating in this study came to the FYC classroom with pre-existing writing vocabularies that both helped and hindered meaning-making, but through collaborative work and reflective activities, students began to adapt their vocabularies to the FYC environment. Implications for classroom instructors, composition programs, university-wide writing initiatives, and further research are also discussed, including ways to adopt reflective self-assessment strategies for the benefit of both students and instructors.

For students to optimize their academic performance, they must be able to accurately monitor their learning. Unfortunately, students’ evaluations of text materials tend to be overconfident when judging the correctness of the information they recall. Recently, Dunlosky et al. (2011) found that using smaller idea-unit evaluation standards (i.e., important ideas of each term definition) reduced students’ overconfidence in their recall errors. Given that these idea-unit standards reduce students’ overconfidence for term-specific concepts, they could be incorporated into a rubric format as a way for students to compare their understanding of the concepts represented in longer texts. Accordingly, the goal of the current studies was to test whether the use of rubrics would improve students’ metacomprehension accuracy. In two experiments, undergraduate students studied 2 expository texts, followed by making judgments for each paragraph. When making these judgments, participants were either given a rubric to assess how well they understood the concepts in the text, or given no rubric at all. The rubric was designed to have students attend to their understanding of the text in each paragraph by making a general assessment about whether they had complete, partial, or no understanding of the concepts presented in the each paragraph. After judgments had been made, participants completed a recall test. Analyses showed students’ judgments were lower for those who received the rubric than for those who received no rubric. Further analyses showed students' overconfidence was reduced for questions that assessed conceptual understanding when receiving a rubric than for those who did not receive one. Relative accuracy was also higher for those using rubrics, although this promising trend was not statistically significant. Results from the present studies demonstrate the promise of rubrics for improving students accuracy; metacomprehension, and how future research might improve upon rubric format in order to decrease students' overconfidence.

The purpose of the study was to determine the effect of instructional treatments on reflective practice and critical thinking in the college classroom at Bowling Green State University in the College of Business. The study employed a quasi-experimental pretest posttest control group design to examine student reflective practice among three treatment groups (T1-students receiving feedback only; T2-students viewing PowerPoint and receiving handout only, T3-students receiving feedback, viewing PowerPoint, and receiving handout) and one control group, which did not receive any instruction or feedback on reflective practice. The pretest and posttest were used to evaluate reflective practice and critical thinking skills among freshmen students (n=253). The study sought to identify the level of reflective practice for incoming freshmen, examine which treatment was most effective in increasing overall reflective practice growth, and which specific thinking skills were most effected by which treatments. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to examine group differences in reflective practice growth. growth. The results indicate that the majority of participants were categorized in beginner status for 5 of the 7 categories presented. Deep thinking, analysis, and synthesis were noted as the categories of thinking skills with the greatest proportion in beginner status and ultimately require the most attention and improvement. The results indicate that freshmen students enter college with low level thinking skills. Research question 2 examined group differences in Growth scores of Reflective Practice. Overall reflective scores were calculated as the sum of all thinking skill category scores. ANOVA results revealed significant treatment group differences in overall Reflective Practice growth, with Treatment Group 3 (PowerPoint, handout, and feedback) outperforming all other groups. ANOVA was also used to examine the effect of instructional differences on each thinking skill category growth score. Treatment Group 3 (PowerPoint, handout and feedback) reported the most growth in all thinking skill categories, while the Control, which had no instruction or feedback, experienced the least growth in all categories. ANOVA results indicate significant group differences for all thinking skill categories; however, effect sizes reveal that the instruction treatments had the greatest impact on deep thinking and synthesis. Although results indicated that feedback alone did not have the greatest impact on reflective practice, it certainly was a necessary component of Treatment 3, the combined instructional strategy. In addition, the feedback-only group (T2) saw more growth in Overall Reflective Practice than T1, the handout/PowerPoint group, indicating feedback is critical to learning.Based upon the results, the research concluded that: 1) the majority of college freshman have low levels of reflective practice; 2) A variety of instructional methods are needed to improve student thinking skill growth; 3) Feedback is a critical component in developing reflective practice.

The engineering mathematics course described in this report is designed to employ project based learning (PBL), using projects to teach and reinforce both mathematics and engineering concepts and applications in a hands-on format. One project involves building a bridge and allows students to conduct testing using standard procedures and to manufacture components with set cross-sectional areas and lengths in an assembly-like manner using a low cost material such as file folders. The students can use a free computer-aided design (CAD) program to facilitate the design as well as conduct virtual testing with no additional cost. The mathematics concepts covered by this project include: graphing, tables and trend analysis, determining the forces acting on individual joints as well as the overall structure, study of cross-sectional area versus length in determining the best support structure, evaluation of various materials for construction, and using measurement tools and technology to determine the amount of stresses and strains and the amount of deflection. All of these studies should enable the student to produce a scale diagram for the final bridge design and to conduct tests on the bridge structure in order to determine the factor of strength (weight held versus the weight of the bridge). The project addresses the use of portfolios as a means for documenting work and changes that have been undertaken during the design process. The use of a portfolio-based project enables the student to document with artifacts and written composition, how the design was determined, how testing was done, and overall lessons learned during the project. The portfolio then could be evaluated using a Design Process Rubric as a means for transferability of credit.

Learners routinely enter basic genetics courses harboring misconceptions which can act as barriers to learning. Conceptual change texts (CCTs) are one intervention for correcting student misconceptions. CCTs are brief passages that introduce a misconception, refute it and explain the correct conception. This study aimed to: (1) develop assessment questions and corresponding valid and reliable rubrics to quantify student responses and (2) develop conceptual change texts targeting three common misconceptions. Two non-science major undergraduate biology classes at a Midwest metropolitan university participated in the study. Three basic misconceptions were identified in the literature: (1) DNA is different in different cells within one individual, (2) the terms gene, DNA and chromosome can be used interchangeably, and (3) mutations always have a negative effect. Assessment questions and CCTs addressing the misconceptions were developed and revised based on study responses. Students answered assessment questions at pre-course and mid-course. At mid-course they also received the CCTs. Rubrics were created using responses to assessment questions given by students and genetics experts (certified genetic counselors). In pre-and mid-course responses, 10.5% (n=78) and 6.3% (n=64) of students stated the first misconception, 49.4% (n=77) and 51.6% (n=64) stated the second misconception and 60.3% (n=78) and 43.8% (n=64) stated the third misconception. Rubrics were developed to quantify student responses. Inter-rater reliability was calculated using Cohen’s Kappa with K1= 0.81, K2=0.82, and K3=0.76. The tools developed through this pilot study will be used in a future study aimed at determining the how effective the CCTs are in changing students’ misconceptions. Genetic counselors should be aware of these and other misconceptions since most consumers of genetic counseling have an education equivalent to those studied and may hold similar genetic misconceptions.

Ten secondary language arts students enrolled in a rural Midwest school participated in this study. The purpose of the study was to determine if using rubrics with secondary language arts students improved academic achievement in the area of writing. Students completed three specific writing assignments using a grading rubric. The researcher evaluated the writing assignments based on the rubric and recorded grades to determine if writing scores improved. Results indicated that half of the students improved academic achievement in the area of writing when using rubrics, while the other half maintained their same scores from the beginning of the study to the end.

Forty-four eighth grade students in a rural, northwest Ohio school participated in the study during September and October of 2002. The purpose of the study was to determine if the use of rubrics in eighth grade science classes improved the quality of lab reports. Students completed one lab report without a rubric and then students and the researcher created a lab report rubric that the students used to write their second lab report. The researcher evaluated both lab reports in eleven categories and compared the pre-rubric lab report with the post rubric lab report evaluations. Students made overall gains in nine of the eleven assessed categories on the post rubric lab report. They also increased anaverage of eighteen percentage points on the post rubric lab report compared to the pre-rubric lab report.

Sixteen high school students enrolled in an elective creative writing class of asmall high school located in rural Northwest Ohio participated in this study. The class included students of varied grade levels and writing ability. Four task-specific rubrics were implemented with the creative writing class. The purpose of this study was to determine if the use of rubrics to assess high school students' creative writing improved writing skills. The results of data analysis indicated that the use of rubrics improved students' writing skills substantially in three key criteria areas of creative writing: organization, word choice/usage, and creative style/originality.